Entertainment Editor-at-Large, Los Angeles

Trust is a powerful thing in television. It can make or break a network. And it can make or break a show.

It may also be the reason that 1.13 million people watched The Last Resort, which has already been axed in the US, and only 792,000 watched Mr and Mrs Murder, which is an original Australian drama.

The difference is that the former is on the Seven Network, whose schedule is enjoying the halo effect of My Kitchen Rules, and the latter is on Ten, which is struggling to recover from its worst ratings performance in memory.

It's an even bigger gap when regional ratings are factored in. Inclusive of capital city and regional ratings 1.7 million people watched The Last Resort, compared to Mr and Mrs Murder's 1.08 million.

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Ten will be very happy with the result, in real terms, because those numbers are a solid improvement on Ten's schedule generally. Mr and Mrs Murder peaked at 936,000, and came second in its timeslot for the number of women and total people.

That's a strong result for a network which spent the last quarter of 2012 with ABC1 snapping at its heels.

Daniel Lissing in Last Resort.

But the result is a powerful indicator of the audience's confidence in Ten. A year ago, in better times, a drama like Mr and Mrs Murder on Ten would have commanded a larger audience.

Despite Ten's management and programming issues, it actually has an excellent scorecard in Australian drama. Offspring is one of the best commercial dramas in the market.

Another Ten drama, Puberty Blues, won commercial and critical acclaim. And the telemovie Underground: The Julian Assange Story was one of the most anticipated dramas of 2012.

Mr and Mrs Murder stars Shaun Micallef and Kat Stewart as a couple who work as commercial cleaners of crime scenes, but dabble in amateur sleuthing.

The Last Resort is a US drama about the crew of a military submarine which goes rogue. Despite being axed in the US, it comes with the hometown advantage of three Australian actors in its cast: Daisy Betts, Dichen Lachman and Daniel Lissing.

As you might expect, fuelled by sheer numbers, the bigger shows took a clean sweep of most of the demographics.

Mr and Mrs Murder was the sixth most watched shows in Ten's declared demographic of 16-to-39-year-old viewers. The top three shows in that demographic were My Kitchen Rules, The Block: All Stars and The Last Resort.